I went to see Barbie because I thought it would open up a conversation about the role of women in contemporary culture. My hunch was correct.

However, I thought that the film would ignore the traditional role of the doll in the lives of little girls. I was wrong. Barbie confronts it straight on, opening melodramatically in sepia to the theme music of 2001: A Space Odyssey. It shows little girls “waking up” to the realisation that they had been conditioned by their dolls to nurture their mothering instincts and precious little else.

Their moment of truth arrives when a towering, glamorous, colourful Barbie in a swimsuit strides onto the scene, winking conspiratorially at them over her sunglasses. The children stamp on the dolls they were happily playing with and a bright new age dawns for womankind.

The first 10 to 15 minutes of Barbie weren't promising. All rosy-coloured Barbieland with nothing but frivolity and winks and nods to American cultural memes, as various Barbies glide around in vertiginous heels, coiffed and groomed to plastic perfection.

Suddenly in the midst of frenetic disco dancing, Barbie brings the entire room to a tense standstill by asking “does anyone think of dying?”

Shocked stares revert to glee when Barbie breaks the tension by saying, “I mean I'm dying to dance”. The frenetic merrymaking resumes. But Barbie finds that her perfect body is showing subtle signs of aging. After taking advice from Weird Barbie she travels to the Real World to meet the child who owns her doll self and is filling her with anxiety and fears of aging and dying.

The real world is … California. If any place on earth approaches Barbieland in its pursuit of plastic perfection it is surely California with its Meghans and Victorias parading around with their poodle Kens.

Oh yes, Ken. In Barbieland Ken was just another accessory. He does nothing but strut around, bronzed and blonde in stylish, gaudy beachwear. But in the real world, he learns to be macho. Here the patriarchy is in charge. The self-confident, ever-smiling Barbie tenses up as men stare and leer at her. But Ken …? He loves it.

The board of Mattel, the manufacturer of Barbie, consists of a dozen sharp tailored men in identical suits. (In the real “real world”, by the way, the board of Mattel currently has six men and five women.) California’s Barbies are nowhere to be seen and Barbie stands out like a gaudy, over-sexed mannequin. Around her are earnest, angsty woke women and “growing-old-gracefully” elderly ladies.

Barbie's owner turns out to be such a woke young woman. She ditched her Barbie doll long ago and she rants at Barbie, accusing her of “holding back women for a generation”. Barbie meets the girl’s mother, too.

As the film winds back to the theme of motherhood and sets it briefly in a more positive light, mother and daughter respond to Barbie's call for help to unseat the patriarchy that Ken has introduced into Barbieland.

The film ends where it began, with the Barbies in charge and the Kens powerless -- but with a difference.

Barbie has found her sexed, human identity with its risks and possibilities. The mother takes Barbie to her first visit to a gynaecologist. Greta Gerwig, the director of the film, made the import of this visit clear in an interview. It means, she says, that Barbie is now sexually active. She wants to have reproductive freedom and to avoid motherhood.

So we are back more or less where we started.